


To be Me

by Tzavine



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Introspection, M/M, Mild Gore, Suicidal Thoughts, but nothing too major, longing mostly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:07:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25122910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tzavine/pseuds/Tzavine
Summary: Vanitas talks to himself.
Relationships: Vanitas/Ventus (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 42





	To be Me

_ Click click click, _ the sound of unhurried steps echoed off the white walls. They were everywhere in here, as inescapable as the maze of hallways that made up this place. These walls were as bright and silent as they stood around him as they always were. The corridors were twisting and nonsensical, the very ground beneath his feet shifting to guide his path where it saw fit, and leading anyone who tried to navigate them in circle after circle. The exit was always easy to find, but the center? The center was near impossible to locate. 

Or at least it had been.  _ Click, click, click, _ he kept walking. He walked and walked and walked. He turned each corner, climbed each staircase, dripped down each hallway with a steady confidence. The puzzle's yawning jaws no longer rose up to swallow him, no. He turned the last corner and there it was at the other side. 

The epicenter. The end. The door. It stood centered in the wall at the end of the corridor, disappearing white into the identical walls around it, but, to him, it was clear as day. 

For the first time since he first returned to this place and came inside, he paused. It was almost like greeting an old friend as he stood there, eyes settling heavily on the final door of this place. An adversary that had long since become a formality and nothing more, this was a friend in the loosest sense of the meaning. No part of this place was ever happy to see him, but they had grown so familiar with each other along the way that it almost seemed to welcome him each time he came. With that familiarity came the emptiness. No, he no longer felt any urgency looking at this door. He had long since solved the labyrinth. 

_ click click click. _

The door opened as he approached it, just as it had revealed itself the very first time. It was no wonder that no one else had found this place but him. This castle, this whole realm, it sensed something within him that belonged behind its locked doors. The white marble slab swung wide, revealing the spires, the barbs, and beyond them all, the body.

That was what Castle Oblivion sensed within him. A piece of the same fragmented heart that belonged in the body before him beat halfheartedly in his chest. 

_ click, click, click, _ he kept walking.

This whole castle had become strange since it was shifted into what it was now, but this room was the strangest of all. Spires littered the ground and burst from the walls, each long spike sticking out at harsh angles as if stabbed into the room from every side. Some extended into the walls or ground, lopsided poles stretched between the two otherwise flat surfaces, and others ended in midair. These were the dangerous ones. Their sharp ends pointed all over the room. It was deadly. This room was a den of needles poised in every direction, barely visible at all. 

White.

On.

White.

This place was not meant to be moved through but all the same Vanitas didn't need to look at the ground as he stepped. He barely swayed as he advanced, slipping with ease through familiar openings just exactly his size. They brushed, they grazed, but no needles stung red in his wake.

_ Click, click, click. _

His hard eyes never wavered from the body. Bit by bit, as he mechanically wove between them, each white line interrupting his vision was peeled away to reveal more and more of him. His hair, his clothes, his armor, with each step he could see more of that green, cream, grey, gold. 

Him.  _ Them.  _ **_Ventus._ **

He was sat, as he always was, in a white throne in the center of the room. Chunks of its tall back were missing and rearranged, sticking out at odd angles and forming a single wing to the left. 

_ Click, click, cluh-click. _

Vanitas came to a stop, the point of last spire between them extending from the corner at the base of Ventus' pedestal to the center of Vanitas' chest warning him to go no further. It would be so easy, really. If he just let his weight slump forward, it would pierce first his suit then skin then bones, every centimeter of surrender bringing him closer and closer to kneeling before his true self. The thought of their shared blood following the spike and pooling beneath Ventus’ dangling feet was almost too pretty to resist, but no. From there, just beyond the castles' last ward, he paused. 

Ventus was just the same as last time, silently slumped to the right. Of course he was, he couldn't run from him like this. He couldn't look at him either, but that didn't matter. He didn't have to, not yet. Vanitas would do that for him, just as he did everything else.

Held at bay by contemplation and nothing more, he looked at him for a long, long moment.

As he studied his face -their face,  _ his _ face- his eyebrows lifted in the middle. The tint to his hair, the natural sweep that it falls in, the slope of his cheeks, the point of his chin, it was all perfect. There was this sense of peace that surrounded him, as if he knew even in his sleep that nothing would harm him here. This empty angel was safe from everything, even the darkness that itched to ooze back down his throat. There he was, right in front of him. Home.

What was left of it anyway.

"It's never going to get easier to look at you," Vanitas asked his original self, "is it." 

The lack of response was expected but still melancholic. Vanitas stepped around the spike and up the last few steps to the throne, his boots finally silent. 

He came to a stop in front of one of the chair's arms, "Ventus' " head lolled away from him. His sleeping chest rose and fell, but that was all. No twitch to his eyelids, no flutter to his fingertips, no voice in his sighs. He was empty. Again. 

There was nothing quite as unsettling as seeing his own face and body belonging to someone outside of himself. It was disturbing in a way that called him closer, that pulled him in by his guts as if there was a string tied around his spine beneath his ribs. Ever since he had become "Vanitas", the existence of his original self called to him like a siren song, no matter how hard it was to look at their separation. Being without him was agony.

"It's like I'm an organ you removed, something sick and rotting. I couldn't survive without you but you're better off without me," Vanitas told himself, both of them, as he raised his foot onto the seat beside Ventus' thigh. He pushed up and sat on the arm of the chair, elbows resting on his knees and looking down at him. Him, me, us,  _ Ven _ .

His cheek came to rest on one fist as he coolly regarded his own unresponsive body sat before him. 

"It couldn't have been different, that's the thing. There was no way to avoid this, but at the same time if it weren't for me, you wouldn't be empty again. You could have changed it though, "Ven." Why did you shorten our name, Ventus?” Vanitas asked idly. There was something about seeing himself like this that made it easier to think, like there was no pressure on his thoughts when he was alone with himself. “Did you feel so different without me too? That was the only reason I let him call me anything different, because without all of me I couldn't really be me. Without you, I’m not Ventus. " 

Ventus slept on. In, out, in, out breath came, up, down, up, down his head tilted as he did. His lack of response was somehow a comfort. If he were really here, there was no way he would let his other half get so close. He'd feel Vanitas before he saw him and then they'd be locked in battle again, and while Vanitas craved the chance to crawl back under his and Ventus' original skin, this has its own rewards. This way, he could really look at him.

Vanitas sank from the arm to sit in the chair alongside Ventus, their thighs touching as he leaned his head back to look at the spikes latticing above them. Not a single one pointed at Ven.

"Why did you run from me, Ventus? We could have been together again. It would have been easy to exist again, for both of us. There wouldn't even be two of us to call "us" anymore, we would be back to being me. You must have lost more than me when we split, to not want that back. Do you not remember what it felt like to be Ventus?"

He must not have, not even in his heart somewhere. Vanitas  _ must _ harbor that part of them himself, because if Ventus had even a fraction of it, he would have felt the same pull. He wouldn't have fought. He'd have understood. Everything would be different. 

There was another long moment as Vanitas took a deep breath and enjoyed the warmth of his original body seeping into his substitute. What he wouldn't give to be him again. Deep down, he knew that was why Ven had run. He felt how readily Vanitas would do anything it took to take him back.

"You liked being us in the end. You felt how right it was. That was worth it for me, but you're the one who changed in the end. I wasn't fighting to be you, not really, because you weren't me anymore. You became you and took my me with you and I was fighting to be the me you took away. You were in the way." Vanitas' chin dipped as he gave a breathy chuckle and looked sidelong at Ventus. "If you think about it like that, it's pretty evil isn't it? I'd have sacrificed you at the drop of a hat."

Vanitas' head thunked back into the tall chair behind, more mirthful snickers dripping into the air around them. He really was a bad person! Even for the fragment that he was, he was bad! He wasn't going to apologize. Slowly, the laughter trickled to a stop.

"It's all over for me then, Ven. There's no fixing this if you're not us anymore. I'll still have to fight you when you wake up, I have to try, but if this won't work then I'll have to start looking for other ways to stop being me. Just like you picking a new name,"Ven." That's just like you, taking all the best parts for yourself."

Vanitas rolled his head back sideways to look at Ventus, eyes scanning longingly over the back of his hair and the restful portion of face he could see. 

"How long are you going to make me wait... This could be over tomorrow if you just came back."

He drew his knee up and leaned his temple onto it, eyes falling to the open hand rested atop Ventus' thigh. He never wanted them to be like this. He reached out and took it, squeezed it in his own, and then fiddled with Ventus' thumb. There was a scar there, one Vanitas knew by heart, having been there when it was cut. It happened on the edge of his keyblade when he first came to the graveyard as one person.

"I don't want to be me, I never did. I can't stop being me until you come back." He dangled Ventus' arm from his hold, pinching him between two fingers and then letting him fall back to his thigh. "I've got to get going soon, they'll notice if I'm gone for too long. They might even find you if they think to look here.” No response. Vanitas patted him on the thigh reassuringly, forgiving and apologizing all in one. This was just the way things were for them. “I just want to be me, Ventus. I'll track you down to do it, but don't worry. This time, I'll be fighting to lose. You'll be there to put an end to me."

For just a moment, it almost looked like Ventus' eyebrows scrunched up a little in the middle, but in the next breath, it had passed. Vanitas stood and swept around to the other side of the throne where Ventus’ head lolled. There he crouched down, resting his folded arms on the arm of the chair and watching Ventus' face head on. 

He really was beautiful. There was a time when he looked like that and Vanitas ached for that to be his own face again, but this one had grown on him like a second skin. Even if he clawed it off, his true self wouldn’t emerge from beneath it. He had lost this face when he lost the rest of his heart and there was nothing he could do to get it back. The past really was the past, it seemed. 

He reached out and poked his old self in the forehead, holding him just slightly lifted with the force of it. "I'll see you again, so don't you go anywhere. I want to be there when I finally get you back."

Another long moment. Leaving was always the hardest. He let Ventus' head droop back forward, bounced once back on his heels, and then leaned up to brush the hair off of Ventus' brow. Eyes closed, his lips followed in a parting kiss to his forehead. 

To him, to them. To what they may never be again. 

"Someday, you won't get away from me anymore," he whispered against his skin and then pressed one more kiss in the same spot. It hurt, everything between them hurt in ways he could never describe. He pulled back away and laid each point of his hair back in place. Just the way he'd found him. "You'll be back, and so will I." 

With that, Vanitas turned and made his way back to the door. It was less dangerous in this direction. The needles pointed his way out, seeing their guest to the exit. The door closed behind him as he passed, ready to open again if he so much as turned around. He didn't.

_ Click, click, click. _

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
